’When I approach a new piece, it is important for me do it justice and to strike
the right balance between the emotional and the intellectual, but this is just
me; others will see in the same music different ideas, and this is the beauty
that is in the art,” says pianist Denis Kozhukhin, who will be performing at the
International Chamber Music Festival in Jerusalem next week.
Last year
Kozhukhin, 25, won The Queen Elizabeth Piano Competition in Brussels, a city he
now calls home. The win gave a powerful boost to his career: “I’ve received many
invitations from important conductors and orchestras, but in the world of today,
with so many competitions around, you cannot build your future on winning the
title of this or that music contest, you have to develop your music personality,
to learn new repertoires, to think and to listen and be clever in managing your
career. It is not easy; traveling and performing takes most of your time, but
it’s worth the effort,” he says.
Born in Nizhny Novgorod (then Gorky)
into a musical family – his mother a pianist, a father a composer and choir
conductor – Kozhukhin studied music from the age of five, “but at the beginning
my parents weren’t sure I would become a professional musician.”
Things
changed when he started studying piano with Olga Fisch, who became his teacher
for many years. He was 13 when he auditioned in Moscow for renowned pianist and
teacher Dmitry Bashkirov, a professor of the Reina Sofia Academy in Madrid, who
said to his father, “Usually I do not accept young boys, but if you are ready to
let him come to Spain, it’s okay with me.”
Kozhukhin is very grateful to
Bashkirov, with whom he spent seven years as a student. “He was a caring friend.
I used to go to his home to ask for his advice not only about music. The first
months in Madrid were not easy, but as soon as I learned Spanish, everything
changed. Since then, I’ve moved a lot and now, looking back, I realize that it
was good to leave home at an early age: I adapt easily to new places, I rely
only on myself, and I learn from my mistakes.”
But above all, it was
about music.
“When I ask myself what is most characteristic of Bashkirov
as a musician and a teacher, I think it is his sincerity, his utter dedication
to music making and to his students, as well as his high standards. As a true
musician, he never stops. With many decades of teaching and performing behind
him, he is never tired of playing the same pieces once and again because,
together with his students, he keeps analyzing the same pieces, very often
revealing new aspects.”
Bashkirov is a passionate person. “More
than once an emotional avalanche went down on us, his students, when we played
something wrong or just not well enough, and I have to admit this was not easy.
But, at the same time, we always knew that his criticism was constructive, that
the storm would pass and that as soon as we did something really well, he would
not hesitate to praise us.”
After spending three years at the Lake Como
Academy, “a very special institution with leading musicians coming to give
classes to six or seven students,” Kozhukhin continued his studies with Kirill
Gerstein, one of the world’s leading pianists of the young generation in
Stuttgart.
“Kirill is blessed with a swift analytical mind, but he takes
his time and enjoys deconstructing a piece, trying to discover its hidden
aspects. His repertoire is immense, and as a result his advice is extremely
instrumental,” he says.
Kozhukhin grew up on Russian music: “We had a
huge LP collection, and I grew up listening to recordings of Tchaikovsky,
Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Shostakovitch.”
Today, Brahms and Schubert are
among his major loves, but he says he is constantly widening his repertoire. “I
also listen to a lot of symphonic music. A pianist has a lot to learn from the
orchestra.”
Who are his favorite pianists? “There are so many – I would
not like to give any specific names because nobody’s perfect, even the great
ones. But for me, Sviatoslav Richter is probably the model of totally
sacrificing oneself to the music. Nowadays there are quite a few pianists who
play amazingly fast and clear, but it is not all about technique as some may
think. Technique for a musician is like colors and brushes for an
artist. This is about the ability to speak and to sing on the piano. And
that is what Bashkirov tried to teach us. So when I choose a musician to
listen to, I opt for those for whom I feel music-making is their
life.”
How does Kozhukhin envision his future as a musician? “To learn
and to perform new music with interesting artists. There’s no end to this. You
can never say, ‘Okay, now I’ve understood it all. And at the end of the
day, I want not to be ashamed of what I have done.”
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